Sure, but as long as the metagame consideration is overtly the most important reason, then for me, it feels like a a zero sum game.
I can see what you mean, but even in your own reply you point to a metagame consideration - namely, feeling bad if the city is destroyed. (I assume you're talking about
you, the player, feeling bad, and not just imagining that, in the fiction, your PC feels bad.)
Anyway, here are some
comments by Ron Edwards that seem apposite:
Before talking about dice or other specific resolution mechanics, I'll discuss two elements of Resolution which are rarely recognized: the treatment of in-game time and space. These are a big deal in Simulationist play as universal and consistent constraints, which must apply equally to any part of the imagined universe, at any point during play.
To talk about this, let's break the issue down a little:
• In-game time occurs regarding the actually-played imaginary moments and events. It's best expressed by combat mechanics, which in Simulationist play are often extremely well-defined in terms of seconds and actions, but also by movement rates at various scales, starship travel times, and similar things.
• Metagame time is rarely discussed openly, but it's the crucial one. It refers to time-lapse among really-played scenes: can someone get to the castle before someone else kills the king; can someone fly across Detroit before someone else detonates the Mind Bomb. Metagame time isn't "played," but its management is a central issue for scene-framing and the outcome of the session as a whole.
And here is a further comment on that last example, which appears under the heading
"Simulationism over-riding Narrativism":
The time to traverse town with super-running is deemed insufficient to arrive at the scene, with reference to distance and actions at the scene, such that the villain's bomb does blow up the city. (The rules for DC Heroes specifically dictate that this be the appropriate way to GM such a scene).
An approach to play in which "narrativism overrides simulationism", and so the protagonist is guaranteed to arrive on the scene as the villain is about to detonate the bomb (even if the protagonist then turns out to be unable to stop the villain) is zero sum in one sense - the player can't get a mechanical advantage just by handling ingame time better - but is not necessarily zero sum in another sense - the player may be able to make decisions, both leading up to the confrontation and during the confrontation, that change the thematic stakes of the scene and its outcome.
Holy storytelling, Batman!
YES, if the pcs know that the bad guys are going to complete their evil plan in three hours and the party goes to take an extended rest, the dm should let the evil plan finish.
Sure, but that's a special case, namely, that the PCs are on a clock and they know it and they know exactly what it is.
More commonly, the players (and their PCs) know that their enemies will complete their evil plan soon(-ish), and a rest
might run the risk of bumping into the time limit. Given that in many campaign timekeeping is a bit approximate anyway (how long exactly does it take to run across the city? to eat breakfast and wash up in the morning? etc - I don't think many games are tracking this down to the last minute, or even to the level of 10s of minutes), in this sort of situation the GM has to make a decision. (Or, in a more old-fashioned style, roll dice.)
Seriously, it sounds like the presumption here is "Nothing happens without the pcs involved!"
<snip>
The idea that nothing happens if the pcs aren't involved is one of the best suggestions I've heard for pushing the idea of D&D as a tabletop skirmish game instead of an rpg.
"The climax doesn't occur without the protagonists present" is not at all the same thing as "nothing happens if the PCs aren't involved". The climax isn't everything. It's the climax.
As for the contention that a protagonist/story-oriented aproach to play turns an RPG into a skirmish game, I don't know what you're basing that claim on. I've got plenty of actual play threads on these boards. I'm happy to be shown where the table-top skirmishing is taking place, but I haven't noticed it.
The bad guys keep being bad whether you're sticking your fingers in their pie or not. And if you miss it and the bad guys bring their plot to completion? Hurray, the world just got more interesting!
Plots coming to completion because ignored by the PCs can be interesting, sure. But that's also orthogonal to the question of climax.
A simple example: suppose that one player has as his PC's most important goal to rescue his beloved from slavery. And suppose that the PC also dallies too long on this quest. Then word might come to the PC that his beloved has been sold to a group of nefarious cultists, who are known to sacrifice their slaves to the spider god on the night of the new moon. So far, so good - the GM takes advantage of slackness on the part of the player to add complications and to ramp up the pressure. But is the beloved going to be sacrificed on the new moon "off-screen"? Without the player's PC in the scene, fighting to save her?
That would be anti-climactic. Maybe the lover get's sacrificed, maybe she doesn't - which is to say maybe the PC succeeds, maybe he fails, maybe he dies trying. But (at least in my preferred approach to the game) the central stories of the protagonists are resolved in play, not by GM fiat as part of handling the backstory and scene-framing.
If you don't play a game that involves this sort of distinction between (i) backstory, (ii) scene-framing and (iii) protagonist-centred plot that emerges out of play, then you won't be moved by what I've said above. But that doesn't mean that what I've described above isn't a viable (indeed, in my experience, highly engaging) way of playing RPGs.
